One of my goals for this blog is to make things that are difficult to find on the Internet less difficult to find, and one of those things is the key to hold in order to boot into the Apple Boot Camp menu at system startup. Finding that information once a year when I need it is always a many-step process, because the Apple documentation is wordy and doesn’t just come out and say:
Hold the Option key down.
Or Alt if it’s a PC keyboard.
There’s also the Boot Camp control panel, too, but obviously you did not, or could not, use it, which is why you were searching for the keystroke combination instead. Hopefully you didn’t have to endure too many answers to questions you didn’t ask before you found this.
Thank you for indulging me. Good day & good luck.
Okay, I know it’s fashionable for people of a Technical persuasion to hate on their choice of the Evil Empire (be it Apple, Google, Microsoft, or someone else), and your use of “fanboi” in this post shows where your bias lies… but, seriously?
If I can find this information in less than a minute by entering “How to boot to bootcamp” into Google and checking either the Boot Camp FAQ link available on the page of the first-returned result (“Apple – Support – Boot Camp”), or the fourth paragraph of the second returned result (“Mac 101: Using Windows on your Mac via Boot Camp”, with the first three paragraphs being standard information on what Boot Camp is and what the system requirements are – hardly unusual for tech docs), I’ve really got to wonder on the scale of the Search-Fu/Reading-Comprehension/Tunnel-Vision Fail that inspired this rant.
Also, if you’ve ever felt the need to tell anyone to RTFM, please consider that all this information and more is in TFM, available from the previously-mentioned first link returned by Google. It’s even pointed to in the Table of Contents on the second page. 🙂
This “reading” you speak of is unnecessary and unwanted, and if I could unlearn how to read I think I would be happier among the idiots of the world. 🙂
Seriously, though, I use a number of Apple products and enjoy them, so long as they don’t run Mac OS X in a traditional way (iOS is just Mac OS X underneath, really). Perhaps it’s just the way Google returns search results for me nowadays, but this sort of thing is exactly what I expect the Internet to provide a clear answer to, rapidly, first shot. And you’re right, the Boot Camp FAQ, #9, is the key. It’s a couple of clicks in, though, and I missed it. The rest is forums and the like, and people ask this question and then get told to use the control panel, etc. Ugh. It now appears that there’s at least one other site, Ask Dave Taylor!, that has the answer laid out clearly, but this post comes in #3 in my own search results now, so I won’t ever have the problem again.
Also, I very rarely tell anybody to RTFM, instead choosing to tell them that they might consider a product whose interface doesn’t work against them in such a way as to require a manual… And yes, I do realize that sometimes the manual is needed. I just wish it was needed less. But that’s a whole other topic.
Thanks for commenting! I appreciate it, even if you were ripping on me. I deserved that. 🙂 I also removed the fanboi comment, and added the Alt key for further clarification. If I’m going to be a dick I might as well be a highly accurate, concise one. 🙂
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